Home brewing beer is a fun craft and many beer lovers are learning how to make their own beer. When you make your own beer you get to save a lot of money from the commercial brands of beer and you get to make different kinds of beer as well. You can play around with the different varieties of malt from barley to all other types of grains you want to experiment on. Beer making entails precision and of course everything has to be sanitary. Once the beer is done with its fermentation process, the beer would then be ready to undergo the process called carbonation.
Carbonation in home brewing can be done in two ways: force carbonation and natural carbonation. The secret in home brewed clear beer and keg carbonation is by doing it with force carbonation method. This makes it a lot easier to keep the beer clear as natural carbonation leaves you with residues. Although this residue is not going to make any change to the taste of the beer but it does affect the aesthetics of the beer and it’s one of the hurdles of many beer makers who want to make their craft beer into a business.
In force carbonation, you are forcing carbon dioxide into your fermented beer by having your own CO2 tank and regulator to ensure that you are putting in the right amount of pressure to get the right amount of CO2 mixed in your beer. There are charts and calculators you can easily find online that will help you through this so you don’t need to manually calculate for that. In force carbonation, it is best to carbonate the beer as a batch first if you plan on bottling your beer. Once you are done with batch carbonation you can now use counter pressure fillers to fill up your bottles with your carbonated beer. When you carbonate your beer in a keg and allow the beer to settle further, the first few bottles of beer would be a bit cloudy which you can just discard. The remaining beer would already be quite clear without much sedimentation.
If you do decide to go for natural carbonation, bottling it using priming sugar surely won’t help in getting rid of the sedimentation from the yeast. However, natural carbonation in kegs would be a better idea. Once natural carbonation process is complete, you can easily remove the sediments that settled at the bottom of the keg. Once the beer that comes out of your keg is clear, that means you already removed most (if not all) of the sediments. This means you can now enjoy your delicious and clear beer even if it’s processed to carbonate naturally.
Other secret is to use Irish Moss after fermentation. You can add Irish Moss and it will help in clearing your beer. It helps coagulate all the protein and tannings that make the beer look murky. Some use fining agents that will precipitate all the solids so you can easily get rid of them as they settle at the bottom of the container. You can easily flush them off if you are using a keg by getting rid of the first few glasses then the rest would be clear beer.